The Miller Center is a nonpartisan affiliate of the University of Virginia that specializes in presidential scholarship, public policy and political history and strives to apply the lessons of history to the nation’s most pressing contemporary governance challenges. more →

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From presidents Carter, George H.W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush.

Project: "The Age of Lead: Metropolitan Development, Environmental Health, and Inner City Underdevelopment"

Leif Fredrickson has been selected as the Ambrose Monell Foundation Funded Fellowship in Technology and Democracy.

Leif Fredrickson's dissertation seeks to answer two questions. First, how did twentieth-century metropolitan development affect lead exposure? To answer this, Fredrickson examines how policies and markets came together to affect energy, housing, and transportation infrastructures that led to increased and often disproportionate exposure from lead in sources such as paint, gasoline and batteries. His second question is: How did lead exposure affect individuals, communities and governments in the metropolis? To answer this, Fredrickson examines how lead affected education, income, medical expenses and other social outcomes for individuals, and how those effects in turn shaped the outcomes of families and communities. He argues that these effects contributed to the long-term inequalities we see across classes, “races,” and metropolitan areas (i.e., the suburbs and the inner city). Fredrickson also looks at how victims and their families and communities dealt with these problems, proactively and retroactively. Finally, Fredrickson examines how the ramifying effects of lead challenged local governments, who faced expensive measures to eradicate lead poisoning but also expensive costs from failing to eradicate lead problems.

Project: The Politics of Crime Control: Race, Policing, and State Power in Modern America

“The Politics of Crime Control: Race, Policing, and State Power in Modern America,” examines the building of the American coercive state from the end of World War I through the early post-World War II years, with particular attention to the entwined processes of criminalization and racialization in the urban North. Chicago serves as the site of analysis, and offers an ideal site through which to consider many of the pivotal transformations in modern American history and their relationship to crime control—including urban expansion, migrations and immigrations, tensions between labor and capital, Prohibition and the temperance movement, industrial boom and economic crisis. The dissertation augments the burgeoning historical literature on the American carceral state, and demonstrates that in order to understand the vast scope of modern coercive state power, scholars must consider the dense legal terrain of American cities, and account for the considerable power wielded by local policing institutions to define the boundaries of legality. The dissertation weaves together analyses of these state institutions, as well as their critics and members of policed communities, drawing on municipal, state, and federal government records, legal treatises and legislative debates, commission investigations, news reports, and the records of social reform and racial improvement organizations. Policing thus serves as a lens through which to understand the production of racial knowledge, the relationship between citizens and the coercive state, and the negotiation of rights in the modern United States.